Tehran Events and Tiananmen Analogies

With so many references to Tiananmen showing up in the news, we wanted to take a quick break from our time away to recommend a couple of the best uses of 1989 analogies (if we weren’t on hiatus, we’d also look at some of the worst, and there have been some pretty bad ones). One powerful rumination on the relevance of China’s 1989 for thinking about Iran’s 2009 is by Andrew Leonard of the “How the World Works” blog at Salon.com:

He begins as follows:

“In the spring of 1989, the fax machine was China’s Twitter — the miracle technology connecting Chinese democracy activists with each other and the outside world. In Berkeley, Calif., the apartment of one Chinese expat student who owned a fax became a 24/7 information clearinghouse. Documents produced by students camping out on the square would emerge magically from the machine in all their subversive glory”…

1) Protests of this sort start out spontaneously, in response to some unexpected political event (election fraud in Iran, Hu Yaobang’s death in China). But they create a self-reinforcing momentum, driven by the regime’s response to popular mobilization. In China, an editorial, reportedly written under the supervision of Deng Xiaoping, was published on April 26th that harshly (in PRC political terms) criticized the student demonstrators. This sparked the massive march of April 27th, which propelled the movement forward.

Are we at that moment in Iran? Whether yesterday’s big march develops into a more sustained political movement will depend, in large part, on how the regime proceeds….”

1 comment

The analogy with TAM 20 years ago is indeed very tempting, and the horizon for the protesters is extremely frightful.But, the fundamental difference is that the opposition have a leader to follow and the leader – Hossein Moussavi – is a fin connoisseur of Iran political since he was minister in the 1980s, what do not make him a democrat. But that could also change the outcome of the protestation since as a trained politician he may propose something feasible in Iranian state structure. I think the question is what project does he have? And does it stick with the huge expectation of the population?